What We’re Looking At

Red Hook Journal

We’re keeping an eye on the Red Hook Journal, the online publishing platform hosted by the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. Aside from noticing a similar design that we’re testing with TPW R&D online (the visible accumulation of connected posts), there’s some great content here. Edited by respected writer/curator Tirdad Zolghadr (with growing contributions by a host of equally acclaimed personalities that hover around CCS), the journal claims to “raise questions of curatorial specificity in an educational context. [Asking] what are the terminologies, exhibition histories, political stakes, aesthetic biases, professional mythicizing and self-mythicizing that create the common denominators?”

Of course there’s lots of the usual opportunities here to think about the apparatus of curating and curatorial studies (with sections like “curating and its institutions” and “artists on curators”) but there’s also some great new potential in the idea and format of a section like “Second Thoughts” which allows writers the space to share latent thoughts and re-assess previous publications or statements.

In a section related to the discussions of online platforms, YouTubing Theory, by filmmaker/writer Hito Steyerl raises a lot of productive red flags relative to TPW R&D, questioning both our impulse to share online archives of other people’s discussions as well as thinking about a potential difference between public access and public engagement.